When political news centers on the policy work or private lives of individual politicians rather than on parties, it can obscure the collective actors citizens must judge at elections. The usual defense is that such personalism attracts readers, especially those otherwise unlikely to choose political news. We test this claim in survey experiments in Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States ( N = 3039). Respondents chose between an entertainment article and a political article whose subheadline attributed a new bill to a party, an individual politician (individualized), or the politician’s personal story (privatized). Personalism recruited no readers. Effects are negative in all countries and pooled amount to a significant five percentage point loss. The losses were concentrated among politically engaged citizens, while the least engaged, the very readers personalism is meant to attract, were unmoved. Party-centered news thus entail no audience sacrifice as citizens prefer the format that keeps parties visible.
Mainstream parties face mounting pressure from radical right challengers. While existing research highlights the electoral costs of accommodating the radical right, we know less about how this decision affects potential coalition partners. When mainstream parties accommodate, this generates spillover effects for potential coalition parties that may be perceived as complicit in legitimising the radical right. We test this mechanism in Germany, exploiting an Unexpected Event during Survey Design: the CDU/CSU’s announcement of tougher migration policy and signaled openness to AfD support. We examine how initial supporters of the CDU/CSU’s potential coalition partners changed their vote intentions in response. We find that the event increased switching from the SPD to The Left by approximately three percentage points, with a similarly directed but statistically insignificant effect for the Greens. These results demonstrate that accommodating the radical right affects not only the accommodating party itself, but the broader coalition landscape in multi-party democracies.
Proposals to change how parties functioned in elections appeared on several American states’ ballots in 2024, often bundling nonpartisan primaries (NPPs) with ranked choice voting (RCV). Given the complexity of the proposals, voters faced a difficult task and may have relied on cues from campaigns when voting. We conducted a post-election survey to measure recalled exposure to campaigns and cues and model the role of cues in voting on these proposals. We find voters made choices consistent with partisan cues they report being exposed to. Democrats recalling Democratic elites were in favor were more supportive. Republicans who recalled a co-partisan elite being opposed were more likely to be opposed. We also used a survey experiment that manipulated exposure to partisan cues to test for effects of cues on support for NPPs and found results that corroborate what we observed with our self-reported survey data. Thus, even in an environment of mass anti-party sentiment, we find rules changes affecting parties may be difficult to pass via ballot measures when there is insufficient support among dominant party elites.
